Researchers have long been interested in the effect of climate on economic output. An explosion of recent research has seen a divergence between “micro” findings, which suggest highly nonlinear temperature responses in specific settings (e.g. agriculture), and “macro” findings, which indicate more muted responses in aggregated settings (e.g. national GDP growth), particularly in wealthy countries as well as globally. The existing findings imply opposite conclusions regarding whether greater wealth allows societies to decouple their wellbeing from the global environment, and diverging policy prescriptions for future climate change. Using comprehensive data on 166 countries followed for half a century, we show that the entire global economy is strongly coupled to the global climate.